Welcome to the PayFAQ: Embedded Payments podcast brought to you by Payrix. As payments and software experts that eat, sleep, and breathe Embedded Payments, we’re as passionate about you as you are about your customers. Each podcast episode will provide insights about Embedded Payments designed to help you feel the transformation and growth of your software business. You’ll learn from industry experts, Payrix customers, and leaders on the Payrix team about the latest trends, best practices, and real-world guidance from payments experts to help you take your software platform higher.
Ian Hillis
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the PayFAQ: Embedded Payments podcast brought to you by Payrix and Worldpay. I’m your host Ian Hillis and today I’m talking to Leah Asdell, Head of Partner Marketing and Content Strategy here at Worldpay for Platforms. Leah, welcome to the show.
Leah Asdell
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Ian Hillis
I am pumped to introduce Leah to our audience. Leah has been in the payments industry for over 10 years and during that time has witnessed the evolution of Integrated and Embedded Payments. Before joining Payrix, she worked at Worldpay for over seven years and has touched almost every portion of the payments business and working with customers of all sizes as well as SMBs (small and medium sized businesses) all the way up to Enterprise and has helped market payments offerings to merchants in a variety of channels, and is currently focused on how to help software companies understand the importance of payment solutions. She’s focused on how payments and financial innovation translate into the software space, and what all that means for our software partners and their customers. And a quick note for our listeners, you’re going to hear Leah and I use a few terms throughout this podcast, including software users, software customers, merchants, we’re all going to count these as synonymous terms used to refer to the entity using the software to run their business. So, Leah, let’s kick things off by telling our listeners a little bit more about your payments experience working with the Global Payments Report at Worldpay and your latest content endeavor, the Merchant Insider Report.
Leah Asdell
Yeah, happy to. I mean, I think you’ve covered it pretty well and in depth. But I’ll go into a little bit around why I think payments are actually exciting. So, when you think about payments, I think you can view it from a couple of different angles. You can think about it from this aspect of its technology, and your marketing technology, and thinking about how the ins and outs work. And then I think you can kind of take a step back and really think about how payments actually fuel commerce around the world. That’s what I think is really interesting, when you come at it from a consumer perspective. In our everyday lives, we interact with different businesses and software platforms on a daily basis. And payments are a really big part of that interaction. It really kind of solidifies the experience that we have through those interactions. So, I think that’s what makes it really exciting is coming at it from that storytelling perspective. And then working with our partners, and our customers on how we’re going to shape that experience. Understanding that end user and how people are using it really does influence what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.
Ian Hillis
This is going to be an awesome conversation. I’m excited. So, Leah, you’ve had the experience across a number of different dimensions. Most recently, you know, I think I’m excited to get a little bit more insight into this Merchant Insider report. But before we get too much into the takeaways and all the fun pieces on that, what prompted this research in the first place?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, within my current role, I really am focused on software partners and how they’re shaping those experiences, especially from the lens of the payments’ world. So, when I started thinking about this, and coming up with the direction we wanted to go, it was around the premise of how are we going to really add value to our partners? There’s a lot of ways to do that. But I think answering that question really started the wheels turning on what we wanted to do. We wanted to really dig in and say we know our partners are really approaching their software from so many different lenses, like any business, they’re thinking about a number of different competing priorities and features and functionality they need to do. Payments isnone of those. So how can we help them understand their customers even further, especially through the lens of payments? I think adds a lot of value when we help answer those questions and getting inside the minds of their customers. That’s really where we can help them. You know, take some of those little takeaways and pick apart the little features functionality, the experience that’s really going to elevate what they’re doing inside of their business.
Ian Hillis
Leah, who did you target as you were generating these insights? What did the population look like? How did you think about how you wanted to craft that underlying population to make sure the results were applicable to the broad base of software partners? A little bit of behind the scenes could be helpful before we jump into the takeaways?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, that’s a great question. It sounds kind of simple. When you think about it, hey, let’s go ask merchants who are using software to run their business, what they think about that software? And what do they think about payments? And what do they want from payments? Once we started digging into it, not quite as easy to find those particular merchants. But we did a really deep dive with a great research company, we explained a lot about our business and who we work with, really focusing on the fact that most of our software partners are very specifically targeting different markets or verticals, as we tend to refer to them. So those that are using software for a very specific purpose. So that’s where we started to dig in on making sure that we asked when we went out into the survey, do you use a broadly focused software to run your business? Or are you using a software that’s specifically built for your business type that you’re doing something like Field Services, or things like gyms or gymnastics companies, you know, that require a very niche point of view. And that’s where we started to dig in, I believe we set the number we were looking for, to get 500 responses from those types of merchants. And so, we did a lot of background work and got there. It took a little longer, but I think it helped really elevate what we found out.
Ian Hillis
Excellent, I’ve had the chance to see this report, I highly recommend anyone listening takes the chance to read it. We could probably talk for two hours about this. But unfortunately, we don’t have two hours, let’s distill it to the if you think about the top three takeaways or data points around this, what comes to mind?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, there are three main pieces that I think we can drill down into, although they’re not the only three, I’ll just caveat that. But if you think about really broad takeaways, there are three things that I believe are super interesting. One is that security really does matter. It’s really something that merchants or those software companies’ customers are looking at, they want to understand the payment security in the lens of knowing that it is secure. So, security is a huge point, the next takeaway that I think was really interesting, is innovation really matters. These merchants are looking for software to stay ahead of the game. It really influences their retention, and payment innovation has an important role. We did find that one out of five merchants are willing to switch software providers to get more payment methods or functionality that they’re looking for that will help them run their business better. The third thing that really came to the top was the value adds and those extras actually are very important. But they have to really work inside the software in a cohesive way. So, you can have a bunch of value adds. But if they don’t tie together seamlessly, they don’t add as much value as you want them to. So, I think what that drills down to is merchants are in the market for software that really meets their overall needs. Fifty percent (50%) of the merchants that we surveyed had an appetite for switching software providers to find overarching needs. So, I think that means that these software companies have a real opportunity to solve those pain points in their business. And those value add can really influence retention amongst their customer base.
Ian Hillis
So, play that back. I heard security, innovation, and value-added services specific to the software. Let’s dig in a little bit deeper. I’m wondering if you were to put your software platform hat on real quick. What do you think the implications for each of those three are for a software company out there?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it was surprising how many merchants actually investigate the security piece of what they’re looking for. That wouldn’t have necessarily been what I would think that we would find that. But seventy percent (70%) of those merchants are actually investigating the security capabilities. So, I think what that means if I’m in the software provider is I want to make it clear how I’m keeping your data safe. And probably showcasing which products I’m using, how it works, I don’t think merchants want a really deep dive into all the ins and outs, they don’t want to become a payments expert. But I think they want to have enough of an understanding to know that it is something that’s being thought of, and taken care of, I think it shows a level of awareness that out there in the world, we’re constantly dealing with fraud attempts, and data being stolen, and they want to know that to keep their business safe, that’s being taken care of for them inside of their software.
Ian Hillis
That makes sense. Yeah, security is always something that comes to mind, particularly at that intersection with payments, I found that my conversations, both the software platforms and their underlying customer base is that it’s not necessarily something they think of on a day-to-day basis, until it becomes a very real thing. When you start talking about money movement, customer data that’s sitting on these systems, it becomes very real. And there’s lots of questions and assessments. So that aligns really well to how I’ve seen the world in my experience there. I’m wondering, in the next bucket around innovation, what do you think there from the implication standpoint?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, I think this is really around, kind of anticipating what your customers want. And being able to prioritize those, right? If I’m the user of the software, I almost want to know that your roadmap for all the features and functionalities, you’re solving those pain points for me as the software developer, before I ever really think about them. And I think that’s a really important note, it’s understanding your customers’ business so well, that you anticipate the needs that are going to come up for them before they have voiced those needs. I think we see that happening here and there, and you see it across different platforms that we use in our day to day lives. Sometimes they roll out things that are like kind of earth-shattering that we didn’t know we needed. And other times, it’s a response to what we’ve been looking for. But I think it’s a really new or a really important nuance for where you develop your roadmap, and prioritizing the ones that are going to have the most impact. I think we all see at all points of business that there are a lot of competing priorities, and you can’t do it all. So really thinking about the biggest pieces that have the greatest impact in the features and functionality you roll out. Whether its payments related or not, is a really important piece to success in attracting new customers and keeping the ones that you have.
Ian Hillis
I think the word innovation can mean lots of different things to lots of different people. Were you able to glean any qualitative responses to the types of innovation that are of most interest or what they were hoping to achieve with this innovation?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, we started to zero in specifically around payments. So, when we asked, we were asking questions around the types of payments innovations that they really want. So, there are a few things when it comes to that that they were really looking forward to and saying this has a key impact on my business. One of those are things around 24-hour settlements. A good majority of the merchants told us 24-hour settlements are really important, and it is something that they’re looking for. Another piece of payments innovation that they really want within the software that’s easy to use is the ability to handle recurring payments. That’s a really key point for a lot of businesses in, you know, automatically being able to do those recurring charges. The other one that we saw a lot around was mobile acceptance functionality. Many merchants said that that would make running a business easier. That’s going to be probably a little more verticalized. You’re really thinking about those that are more in-person than online, but it was something that was high enough that we wanted to call it out.
Ian Hillis
That’s great. And for the final bucket value added services. For our listeners who have listened to a couple episodes, Andy Meadows and I discussed value added services specific to payments a couple episodes ago, but Leah, within the context of this particular report, what are the implications that you saw as it relates to the software?
Leah Asdell
Yeah, there were a couple of things. They wanted as it relates to value adds. But we heard over and over that they have to layer into the overall experience and have to be really easy to use. It was really important to not have to a bunch of bells and whistles without a really defined journey for running their business. So that was something that we found that was really interesting and important to these merchants. A couple of things that they said were pain points when it came to what we would classify as value adds inside of the software. Surprisingly, a number of software users said that one of their key pain points when it related to payments was being able to receive capital loans inside the software solution. I think that’s not something we expected. But a lot of merchants actually are looking for it. And within our business, we would classify that as a value add. The other pain point was they want to be able to pay out multiple people inside of that software. Seems like simple functionality, but it is a real value to someone running a business that might not seem as intuitive, but it’s something that they really are looking for.
Ian Hillis
That’s helpful. Yeah, I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface across a number of topics here. But if listeners are interested in learning more about the next level of detail, where can they go to find out more about the Merchant Insider report?
Leah Asdell
We have it on Payrix.com. You can find it in our Resources section on the website. We are also going to be doing a webinar in July, where we go into a lot more detail in depth when it comes to this. So, keep an eye out for some announcements on social media for that upcoming webinar.
Ian Hillis
Amazing, Leah, the insights here have been fantastic. And it sounds like there’s a couple events coming up where we can continue to learn more. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Leah Asdell
Thanks for having me.
Ian Hillis
Listeners, we want to be a trusted resource for software providers who are out there trying to make sense of Embedded Payments and Finance to help them get the education they need to make the business decisions their customers and investors will thank them for. Thank you to everyone joining the conversation today and I look forward to continuing the conversation next time.
Thank you for joining us today on the PayFAQ: Embedded Payments podcast brought to you by Payrix. For more information about Embedded Payments, subscribe to our show at Payrix.com/podcasts.
